The Walrus Oil Spill Plan
Today, on Day 69 of the Gulf of Mexico spill, Mississippi officials announced the appearance of tar balls on their shores and BP announced that the cost of the response has reached $2.65 billion. What has not been announced is any sort of cohesive or effective plan to stop the oil from gushing out of the rig at a rate which is now estimated to be between 1.5-2.5 million gallons of oil per day. Also unannounced was an overarching plan to insure the safety of future deepwater drilling, which has been placed on an extended moratorium by President Barack Obama.
While the nation is finger pointing at BP for their lack of oversight and disaster management readiness, the heads of other large oil companies have attempted to distance themselves from the environmental disaster, arguing that they would have drilled differently than BP. However, the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee’s June 15th hearing highlighted the fact that ill-prepared response plans are endemic of the oil industry. The CEOs of Exxon Mobile, BP America, Shell Oil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips took a beating on Capitol Hill from a Congress who found the companies’ nearly identical spill response plans to be nothing short of flawed.
House Energy and Environment Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey:
What we found was that these five companies have response plans that are virtually identical. … The covers of the five response plans are different colors, but the content is ninety percent identical. … Like BP, three other companies include references to protecting walruses, which have not called the Gulf of Mexico home for 3 million years. Two other plans are such dead ringers for BP’s that they list a phone number for the same long-dead expert.
Rep. Bart Stupak noted that Exxon Mobil’s plan includes a 40-page appendix devoted to how it will deal with the press following such an incident — juxtaposed with five pages on the plan for protecting resources and nine pages pertaining to oil removal.
Inane references to walruses and safety reports more focused on managing public opinion than the environment should enrage lawmakers. However, congressional outrage on this topic needs to be channeled into focusing on the future of our energy sources. As we’ve stated before in our jointly released report with the Sierra Club “Ending Our Dependence on Oil,” the United States needs to concentrate on diversifying its energy supplies and invest in the research and development of alternative sources in order to establish long term energy security. The spill catastrophe and the potential for other petroleum-related disasters highlights yet another reason we must invest in new sources of energy and lessen our petroleum dependence.
